


your happy ending's up to you

by plinys



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Hydra (Marvel), The Framework Universe (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 08:37:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12032196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: Five times Lance Hunter made Bobbi question her loyalties to Hydra, and one time she knew exactly what side she was on.(or Huntingbird in the Framework verse)





	your happy ending's up to you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MusicalWheaten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MusicalWheaten/gifts).



> THIS IS SO LATE, I AM SO SORRY! I hope you can still enjoy this very much belated birthday gift, because you are awesome and my hero and just so sweet that you deserve so much more than this little late fic.

1

It was always inevitable that SHIELD would fall. 

A fact. Known to the only people that mattered. They used to whisper about it, both sides knowing that inevitably the coin would flip, it just mattered where you stood. 

Hartley had told her about it first, two drinks into the night, a worried look on her face. The feeling that there was change in the air and not for all the right reasons. She’d introduced Bobbi to her partner, a woman with red in her hair and a clear distrust of everyone other than Hartley, and the overgrown teenager pretending to stand guard behind her. 

(In hindsight, that was Hand’s mistake, trusting the boy that would put a bullet in her head for Hydra.)

(In hindsight, this was Hartley’s mistake, showing Bobbi who stood on which side, knowing the players made it easier to predict the end result.)

There was no way to prepare for it.

Not really.

Though they’d talked, all of them. 

Some days she imagined that when SHIELD fell she would be with Hartley and Hand and those loyal to protecting the world, to fighting the good fight that Captain America had started long ago.

Other days she imagines when SHIELD fell she will be with her usual partner, a woman who had her loyalties programmed into her by Russian Hydra operatives, with no question of who Bobbi was going to be pointing her gun at. 

When it actually happened it was almost nothing.

A blip on her radar.

A message from Carol, address to a safe house that she didn’t know whose side it belonged to.

A man in bed beside her, after many nights of the same, many nights of almost and maybes, and perhaps if the tides hadn’t been turning, if Hydra hasn’t been rising up out of the shadows, Bobbi might have stayed in that bed beside him. 

Let him kiss her and claim her once more, and forget about everything other than the way his voice sounded forming the syllables of her name. 

She doesn’t do that.

Instead, she slips out of the bed, carefully and slowly, like she’s been trained to, and leaves without a whisper or note, after only a moment’s hesitation.

  
  


2

“You’re one of our best undercover operatives.” 

The words are meant to be a compliment. 

She realizes this, even if they are delivered in a deadpan from a woman far too highly ranked to be paying  _ Bobbi  _ a piece of mind.This should feel like an honor not a threat. Invited up for tea into the Hydra penthouse. A place seldom few are privileged enough to be welcomed into. 

And yet - 

Sitting her on the overstuffed white couch, her cup of tea growing cold where it sits on the wooden table, the ornate Hydra symbol on the wall just in the corner of her peripheral vision. She cannot help but feel uncomfortable. 

“How long have you been loyal to Hydra?”

“Forever,” Bobbi answers automatically, instinctively. 

There's something there for a second, the ghost of a smile on the other woman's face. Almost, then gone a moment later. People have always said Madame Hydra was hard to read, though Bobbi’s chances to read her had always been limited. 

They all had theories about it; Hydra indoctrinates, traumatic childhood, hidden mental illness. Once Clint had suggested she was a robot but Clint suggested that  _ everything  _ was a robot even his kids on occasion so no one had listened to him. 

In the end it didn't matter. It didn't help her. Sitting here staring at a woman with features put together not quite right. The woman who was watching as though she could see everything there ever was to know about Bobbi and yet still found her lacking.

Still found a flaw in the picture presented before her. 

“Forever,” Bobbi insists again because what else is there to say.

“And nothing could change that?”

“No,” she says quickly, perhaps too quickly, but there is no time for hesitation. Not when taking tea with a snake. 

This seems to satisfy her because a second later the Madame sets down her own cup, long since empty, and reaches for a tablet, pulling up some files that are presented to Bobbi a moment later. 

“I found something curious when I was looking into your background,” she says, as she hands Bobbi the tablet. 

Of all the things she was expecting,  _ that  _ face was not the one she had expected to finding staring up at her.

“Tell me what you know about him.”

“He’s a nothing, a mercenary, a fool-”  _ who once claimed to love her  _ \- “Who can be bought by the highest bidder.”

“It appears the resistance has bought him.”

  
  


3

He says the word, “You,” with betrayal and conviction even though it’s been years and Bobbi almost wants to laugh at how easy this mission is, how it’s basically handed to her on a silver platter. 

Ward, loyal to the Resistance to a fault, in memory of the mentor he put down to maintain his over cover shoots her a sympathetic look, “Ignore, Hunter, he’s drunk.”

“When isn’t he,” she replies, quickly, automatically, because even after nearly ten years this much she remembers. 

Ward grins at her, “It really is good to have you here. Good to know there’s another one of us fighting the good fight from in the inside.” 

She's not. Of course she's not.

It's just a mission.

And she knows when she goes back she's going to have to wonder why this  _ mole  _ inside of Hydra has never been taken care of. Why the Madame was comfortable knowing one of her top inhuman collections agents was actually a double agent for the Resistance.

Never ask.  Asking is impossible.

Especially considering that Carol had calculated the odds of her dying on this mission at a pleasant forty-five percent. While Jessica had been hanging from the ceiling and insisting that it was at least a solid sixty-three percent. If she didn't make it out of here, there would be no one to know the way Grant Ward smiles at her like she's somehow given him hope for the world.

Hunter does not possess the level of trust that Ward does, his eyes narrowing at her, even as he drums his fingers against the beer bottle in his hands.

“You really want me to believe that the  _ she demon  _ of Hydra is working for us?” 

She’d expected this, that if there was anyone who would doubt her story it would be him.

She’d also planned for this. 

“Hartley recruited me, years back,” she replies, a nod to Ward who could be her alibi without even realizing that she was using him.

He nods once, as expected. 

“Izzy’s dead,” Hunter replies, voice cold and hurt and Bobbi wouldn’t be lying if to say that she felt the same way.

She remembered the report coming in. Remembers keeping her features stock still as Natasha read it off, pretending that the name meant nothing to her. 

She’d almost forgotten that Hunter had known Hartley too. That she’d introduced them once years ago, asked the other woman to look after him, back when Bobbi thought she might have been starting to learn what love was.

Hartley had kept her promise.

Whereas Bobbi - 

“That’s not my fault,” she says, responding to the hurt in his eyes. 

“Does telling yourself that make it easier to sleep at night?” 

  
  


4

Natasha used to insist that it was easy. That you just had to lie back and think of Hydra. Remember your duty and obligation, follow your orders. 

Carol would call it nonsense, but her loyalty to Hydra was shaky at best and the list of men she'd let fuck her stopped and ended with well ranked military officers.

Jessica had given her a wink that meant too much and too little all at once.

They'd been young once, not quite drunk but not sober enough to stop the conversation, remembering the days before SHIELD fell. The days where life was as easy as following orders. The days when some of them might have been loyal to other people. 

Someone had made a joking comment, not Bobbi, though she'd laughed while pouring out another round of shots, about whether  _ Madame Hydra  _ too had lain backward and thought of Hydra every night or whether her and  _ the Doctor  _ gasped out their hails mid thrust. 

Her mind hadn't been in the moment, hadn't been captured by Jessica’s terrible Scottish accent or Carol’s breathless moans her mind had been on someone else.

An almost moment. 

When she'd been undercover, loyal to Hydra since the beginning, but almost forgot her mission for a moment because of an SAS officer that had called her love and fucked her like she'd never been fucked before. 

It had been something she'd laughed off at the time. That night in a city so different from the one she was currently in.

A hotel room with a view of the city.

Not an underground bunker and a bed that squeaks and two guns sitting on the bedside table.

She should be laying back and thinking of Hydra, remembering the mission, thinking about getting information out of him while they bask in the afterglow. 

His lips were still sealed tight with distrust usually, but here where there was nothing between them the tension from his body had slipped away and he was hers.

Just as she had remembered him to have been once before. 

All she can focus on is him. The way his hands trace the curves of her body almost reverently, pressing kisses like blessing into the curve of her hips, muttering about how it's “been too long” and how he “always knew” and “god Bob” and it's too much.

When he slips between her thighs, his mouth on her. She almost forgets all about Hydra and missions and the resistance just for a moment. Forgets about everything other than him.

She wonders briefly how Natasha could ever do this, and insist it's just for the mission.

Before he does this  _ thing  _ with his tongue and all she can do is moan out his name.

  
  


5

“I don’t know why I’m surprised,” he says, and she doesn’t know what to say.

What is there to say?

That this was a mission and she was just following orders. That there’s a gun pointed between them, her shirt button up wrong in her haste to get to this, and she’s not sure if she’s able to pull the trigger. 

_ How long have you been loyal to Hydra? _

A question that had been rolling around in her brain for too long. That had been there like a familiar echo as she transferred Resistance data files, as she tipped off their base locations, as she ignored the way everyone on this base seemed to speak with hope in their tone.

Almost everyone.

Not him.

Never him.

He’s the only one that had been honest and real, the one that she used as her ticket in, as a way to cover up her own not so morally just intentions. It had been easy, until it wasn’t, until they were here with accusations flying and a gun that felt too heavy in her hands. 

“You don’t have to do this, Bob,” he says, like he’s trying to talk her down. His hands held out in front of him, palms facing her, begging for one more chance.

She wonders why looking at him seems so familiar, as though she’s seen this scene before,  in another place, in another life, a ring glinting on his finger, dark green bed sheets knocked to the floor right before - 

“I don’t know what else to do,” she says, the words finding their way past her lips without her even thinking about them. A thought trapped in her head. A doubt that had been there for years. That this wasn’t the side she belonged on.

But what else was there to do.

Her decision had been made for her years before, pulled by invisible strings into the correct position, a player in a chess game so large she couldn’t see more than the square in front  of her. 

“Stay,” he says, like it’s easy. 

“Stay,” she echoes, like she just might. 

  
  


+1

“Run away with me,” she says, like she should have said years ago.

It’s too late now.

Fire raining down on the safe house they’ve hidden themselves away in, a bloody hand pressed to his side, her batons lost somewhere long ago.

But he smiles at her there for a moment, and kisses her with intention and a promise of more.

It was always inevitable that she would die. 

A fact. Known to everyone with a beating heart. 

It had only ever been a question of who she would die beside.

“I thought you’d never ask, love.”

 


End file.
